Reflections of a Paralytic

The Blog

Bioethics and the Birth of Christ

This is a classic post, from Msgr. Charles Pope on “Bioethics and the Birth of Christ”:

As we approach Christmas we ought to ponder the magnificence of human conception, gestation, birth and life. Even as we extoll the birth of Jesus, we also do well to acknowledge the awesome and mysterious truth that every human person emerges not merely from a biological process, but from the very mind and heart of God, from his will and as an act of his love. None of us are here by accident.

He goes on to discuss the many ways that God’s sovereignty over human conception and life are usurped or ignored in modern times via In Vitro Fertilization, irreverence for sexuality, abortion, and rejection of the disabled and the imperfect. Read the whole thing.

In recent decades the creation of new human life has become nothing more than a biological formula — a scienceexperiment, rather than the mysterious fruit of a loving act between husband and wife.

“When life is merely a technology to do with as we please,” Msgr Pope writes, “it is not long before we end up in some pretty dark places.”

Since the creation of human life has been taken out of the womb and into the science lab we’ve seen some pretty dark stuff: women exploited and abused, babies bought and sold on the black market…

Let us remember

In Gaudium et Spes we read: “[O]nly in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (22)

By His Incarnation, Christ intimately united Himself to the entire human race and showed us the incomparable value of every human personfrom the very beginning and reminded us that God alone is the author of all human life.

While we are called to cooperate with Him in the mystery of creation, the initiative, says Msgr. Pope, is always God’s. We do not have the authority to take matters of — either the beginning or the end of — human life into our own hands.